Justice Sandile Ngcobo (56) was on Thursday appointed the country’s new chief justice.
According to the Constitutional Court website, Ngcobo was born in Durban in 1953, graduated from the University of Zululand with a Bachelor of Law degree and studied towards an LLB at the University of Natal from 1983 to 1985.
He completed an orientation course on the United States legal system in Washington in 1985 before studying for an LLM at Harvard law school, where his focus was constitutional law, labour law, international legal process and international human rights.
He was in detention from 1976 to July 1977.
He worked in the Maphumelo magistrate’s office from September 1977 to April 1978 when he joined a law firm in Durban as an articled clerk, becoming an associate attorney.
In 1982 he moved to the Legal Resources Centre in Durban.
From July 1986 to July 1987, Ngcobo was the law clerk and research associate of the former US Court of Appeals Third Circuit Chief Judge A Leon Higginbotham Jun.
His duties included researching and preparing legal memoranda on issues before the court. He also researched the role of law in American and South African societies.
From August to November 1987 Ngcobo was a visiting foreign attorney at Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he specialised in labour law.
In 1988 he returned to South Africa and took up the post of acting director of the Legal Aid Services Clinic of the University of Natal.
In December 1989 he returned to Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz as an associate attorney in a firm of about 300 lawyers, specialising in labour and immigration law.
Ngcobo returned to South Africa again in 1992 to practise as an advocate in Durban. His focus was labour and employment law, constitutional law and general practice. In 1994 he lectured part-time in constitutional litigation.
From April 1996 to the end of August that year, Ngcobo was an acting judge of the Supreme Court, Cape of Good Hope Provincial Division. In September 1996 he was made a judge of the same division. From January to December 1997 he was an acting judge of the Labour Appeal Court; in November that year he was appointed a judge of the court.
In 1999 Ngcobo was appointed the acting Judge President of the Labour Court and Labour Appeal Courts.
He has a daughter, Nokwanda, and two sons, Ayanda and Manqoba with his wife, Zandile. — Sapa